Literary Fiction · Novel
The Distance Between Tides
A novel of memory, return and the sea — two sisters, one harbour town, and the summer that rearranged everything.
2024 · Halcyon Press · 312 pages · Available in hardcover, paperback and audio
About the novel
When marine biologist Mara Quinn returns to the harbour town of Greyport after her mother's death, she intends to stay a week — long enough to sell the family cottage and leave. Instead she finds her estranged sister June living in the attic, a box of unsent letters in the boathouse, and a town that remembers her differently than she remembers herself.
Told across two timelines twenty years apart, The Distance Between Tides follows the Quinn sisters through the summer their father disappeared and the autumn they finally speak of it. It is a book about what families keep from each other out of love, and what the sea keeps out of habit.
The novel took four years to write, including two research seasons on working fishing boats. Reviewers have praised its “salt-worn sentences” (The Meridian) and its refusal of easy reconciliation — the ending, like the tide, gives and takes at once.
Reading & teaching
The novel is taught in contemporary fiction seminars and book clubs across the country. A free reading-group guide — with chapter questions, a timeline of the two summers and an author Q&A — is available on request for clubs of six or more.
